Before the Emergence of Critical Citizens: Economic Development and Political Trust in China

Abstract

Political trust has been declining among the publics of almost all advanced industrial societies in recent years. This has been attributed to a Materialist–Postmaterialist value shift, which has given rise to a public that is less deferential to authority and increasingly ready to challenge government. This phenomenon has been interpreted as a ‘crisis of democracy’. Although one might expect to find low level of political trust in repressive authoritarian societies, survey data indicates that political trust in China is actually very high. Does this simply mean that people are afraid to express any opinions that might be viewed as critical of authority? As this article will demonstrate, this does not seem to be the case. The Chinese public expresses fairly strong criticism of some aspects of Chinese society – but they express high levels of confidence in the national government. Although rich democracies provide both a higher standard of living and more personal freedom than is available to the average Chinese citizen, the Chinese public expresses higher levels of confidence in government than those found in most advanced industrial societies. We conclude that economic development has the immediate effect of enhancing public support for the government – but in the long run it also leads to value changes that promote critical citizens. At least for now, the regime-enhancing effect of economic development still dominates the regime-eroding effect. The effect of changing values on distrust of government is largely overwhelmed by the support for government brought by the increased level of affluence.

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